


Mountains and Valleys (And All That Will Come Between)

by blackorchids



Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Domestic, Elena Gilbert-centric, Elena Is Happy, Everyone Is Alive, Future Fic, Gen, Growing Old, Growing Up, Moving On, POV Elena Gilbert, Post-Canon, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-08
Updated: 2019-04-08
Packaged: 2020-01-06 17:31:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18393062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackorchids/pseuds/blackorchids
Summary: The dust has settled and they're moving on. Here's to the next hundred years.Or, three lives Elena is happy with, even if they're not quite what she expected.





	Mountains and Valleys (And All That Will Come Between)

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [23emotions](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/23emotions) collection. 



> title from a song on _the greatest showman_ soundtrack.

They move away from Mystic Falls. It’s horrible and emotional and Elena cries as she hugs each one of their friends, cars packed up, houses sold, phones destroyed, maps marked up and highlighted.

The lot of them are moving to different corners of the world, separating with the knowledge that they’ll see one another again, sometime, but not in this lifetime. A few of them are headed to the airport, passports with new names in hand, and Elena wishes them all safe travels, hugging them extra tight before they get into their respective cars and leave.

She hugs Jeremy the longest, has to allow herself to be pried away from him, can feel her heart imploding as she thinks about how long it’ll be until she sees her brother again. But they’ll be alive and they’ll be safe, and they’ll be able to finally just _live_.

Eventually, it’s her turn to leave, and there’s no one else to say goodbye to. So she gets into her car and goes.

It’s two days later that she reaches Seattle, and she collects the keys from her new landlord and then sleeps for the next twenty-odd hours. When she wakes up, it’s time to start her new life.

*

Marie Boneva is a twenty-six year old English teacher. She’s quiet, and a little awkward, and she never accepts invitations to go out, until, one day, she does.

The group of teachers is mostly young, with one notable exception, an older woman who watches the rest of them complain about policies and frustrating students and grading with a peaceful expression on her face. Irene is content to talk to Marie, calls her _an old soul_ after the third time they’ve spent the evening together, nursing single drinks.

The first school year passes in a blink, and Marie has stopped startling when people call her that instead of anything else. Some of the teachers are genuinely her friends, and she can sense some of her old friends in the curves of their smiles or the tone of their laughter, but she also has started loving these new friends for themselves instead of who they remind her of.

Somehow, somewhere, they get to talking about exes, and Marie listens to them dreamily describe high school sweethearts and college regrets as they get drunker and drunker. She remembers the football star to her cheerleader, the mysterious new boy who shared her affinity for journaling, the one with the glasses in her biology lectures, the curly haired one in her pre-med labs.

Striking blue eyes flash to the front of her mind and she thinks about trying to summarize how each of them made her feel in a few funny stories or romanticized anecdotes and—

When Violet asks, “What about you, Marie? Any juicy tales?”

All she says is, “Nothing exciting.”

*

Helena Marks is a twenty-five year old event planner. Arizona is sunny and beautiful and Helena is an avid hiker in her free-time. She’s better at making friends than Marie was, and she drinks more than Marie did.

Helena specializes in weddings, but Paradise Valley has her doing a lot of Bar Mitzvahs and Graduation Bashes as well, which keeps her evenings busy and her social circle thriving. 

Party planning is at once easy and complicated: customers have outlandish requests that Helena sometimes struggles to fulfill, but she’s yet to have a bad review, and word-of-mouth means a lot in this ritsy upper-class suburb. 

She and her closest friends spend a lot of time tanning in the pool in the yard of the condo Helena is renting, and she takes up horseback riding _like an old pro_ , and is the only one of her friends to actually enjoy camping.

Audree and Harper complain about their parents after the three of them get tipsy at a wildly successful business gala that Helena’s managed to pull off by the skin of her teeth, taking turns talking shit about secrets and divorces and affairs.

Helena thinks about parents who aren’t really her parents and torture chambers hidden in the basement of doctors’ offices and uncles who sneer all her life but give their own for her safety. She can picture the family cabin and it’s secret closets full of hunting gear and the ring on the finger of the only guardian who ever knew the whole truth and still stayed and—

When Harper turns to her with raised brows, clearly expecting her own _parents suck, let’s never be like them_ tale of betrayal and intrigue, all she says is, “My parents were pretty boring, actually.”

*

Rachel Holtz is a twenty-two year old art major, specializing in pottery and complaining about North Florida’s ridiculous humidity levels. She wears too much eyeliner and sleeps with girls and volunteers at the animal shelter and watches foreign films.

She works at a shoe store in the mall in her free time, makes fast friends with the other mall workers through liberal use of _The Office_ style looks at one another when a customer is being particularly draining. She doesn’t drink much but smokes a ton of weed and always smells like patchouli and she’s into slam poetry, though she doesn’t share her own, yet.

Classes are interesting, and ruining her careful manicures with thick clay is exciting, and when she takes a make-up class, she’s praised constantly for her _ethnically ambiguous_ coloring as well as her creative takes on common looks.

All of Rachel’s friends are vegan liberals, and when the blood bus comes around every six weeks, most of them go to donate. Blood doesn’t bother Rachel, who claims to be squeamish at horror movies, and needles aren’t an issue, either.

Penelope and Liz praise her bravery, and Rachel doesn’t even blink at the onslaught of mental images of dungeon cellars and weird pseudo-science and crazed doctors doing way illegal operations on _non-human specimens_ and—

“I don’t know,” she says, instead, the lie burning in her throat. “They’ve never been a problem, for me.”

*

Elena Salvatore is a twenty-eight year old writer, and she lives in a high-rise that overlooks Central Park. It’s election year, and she’s been trying to keep her articles as unbiased as possible, but she’s lived a lot of years, at this point, and it’s hard to keep from rolling her eyes when the denizens of this fine country keep repeating their mistakes.

Elena’s husband comes home late, exhausted from long hours at the free clinic he works at but eyes shining with satisfaction at the work. They watch the news on mute, sharing quiet anecdotes about their day during the commercials.

Elena’s texting Caroline, and it’s been long enough that the jokes are funnier than they are painful, and when Damon leans over to turn off the lamp on his side of the bed, Elena clicks off her phone and lets him pull her close, one hand brushing her bangs from her face, and—

“Goodnight,” she tells him, a century of words silently passing between them.

**Author's Note:**

> is this fandom even alive anymore???
> 
> come talk to me on [tumblr](http://www.rosalinesbenvolio.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
